Systematic Theology – Eschatology

Captivity and Restoration

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 9 of 32

Track: #9

Year:

Dictation Name: 09 Captivity and Restoration.

[Rushdoony] Let us begin with prayer

We praise Thee our Father for the glory of Thy grace and government, for the certainty oh Lord that Thy cause shall triumph, Thy kingdom prevail, and the ends of the earth shall serve Thee. Give us grace to serve Thee now in the day of adversity, to be more than conquerors through Jesus Christ, to know our Father that Thou who hast called us, wilt empower and bless us and give us the victory through our Lord. Give us hearing ears and hearing hearts now, that we may hear Thy word, rejoice in it, and acts in terms of it. In Jesus name, amen.

Our subject this morning is captivity and restoration, captivity and restoration; and our scripture Isaiah 4 verses 4-6.

“4 When the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof by the spirit of judgment, and by the spirit of burning.

5 And the Lord will create upon every dwelling place of mount Zion, and upon her assemblies, a cloud and smoke by day, and the shining of a flaming fire by night: for upon all the glory shall be a defense.

6 And there shall be a tabernacle for a shadow in the day time from the heat, and for a place of refuge, and for a covert from storm and from rain.”

We have been in recent weeks dealing with eschatology, and in particular endpoint eschatology. Eschatology is the doctrine, or the word concerning last things. But there are two kinds of eschatologies in the Bible, endpoint and end time eschatologies. End time eschatologies deal with the end of the world, the resurrection of the dead, the judgment, heaven, hell, and the things to come. Endpoint eschatology deals with what happens in history when the wages of sin come due, and when the rewards of righteousness come due in time and in history.

Before we go into the basic end point eschatology of the Bible, captivity and restoration, we need to consider again the question of why it has been neglected. Courses are taught on eschatology at Christian colleges, and seminaries, and there are churches that have courses, long series of evening messages on the doctrine of the last things. But always only with the end of the world, never with the endpoint eschatology, why? The Bible is so clear on the subject, the reason is that we have separated the natural world around us from God, and we have limited God to the realm of the supernatural. WE have given the natural realm a considerable measure of independence in our thinking, and as a result the only way we believe that God can work in time and in history is by some kind of interruption, or through miracles. As though God were not continually at work in history in every event, and the Bible is clear that all things come from the hand of God, that His government is present in and through all things.

Now some people don’t like to think of that because they bleive it makes God responsible for a great many things that they don’t like as they view the world. But as God tells job and the three friends of Job when He answers them out of the whirlwind, He says in effect “I created the world, the stars before you existed, and my yardstick was not you, but My purpose. So you cannot apply your standards to my creation.”

Moreover, Luther used an image in describing this problem. He said it is like type being set, when it is set it is all backwards and we cannot read it, it looks all wrong to us. But when the plate is run off, on the paper it comes out right side up, and all is made plain. And he said so in history the events seem to be all contrary, but when we see the final outcome from eternity we recognize the perfection of it. As a result it is important as we consider eschatology to see that God’s hand is in everything, it is not limited to the miraculous, it is not reserved to the supernatural realm.

Now as God describes through scripture, his end point eschatology in history, one of the basic factors therein is captivity and restoration. Captivity is punishment for sin, it is judgment on a people; and because history is God’s handiwork over and over again we see the working of captivity and restoration. The Lord manifests His judgments in and through events. For example Hosea 10 verse 12-15 makes this very, very clear. We read:

“12 Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the Lord, till he come and rain righteousness upon you.

13 Ye have plowed wickedness, ye have reaped iniquity; ye have eaten the fruit of lies: because thou didst trust in thy way, in the multitude of thy mighty men.

14 Therefore shall a tumult arise among thy people, and all thy fortresses shall be spoiled, as Shalman spoiled Betharbel in the day of battle: the mother was dashed in pieces upon her children.

15 So shall Bethel do unto you because of your great wickedness: in a morning shall the king of Israel utterly be cut off.”

Now people are ready to believe that that happened to Israel, it did history tells us, but they are not ready to see that same fact at work today. The Lord declares that He uses captivity in judgment as a means of shaking up people and recalling them to Himself. We read for example in Jeremiah 24 verses 4-7:

“Again the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,

5 Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel; Like these good figs, so will I acknowledge them that are carried away captive of Judah, whom I have sent out of this place into the land of the Chaldeans for their good.

6 For I will set mine eyes upon them for good, and I will bring them again to this land: and I will build them, and not pull them down; and I will plant them, and not pluck them up.

7 And I will give them an heart to know me, that I am the Lord: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God: for they shall return unto me with their whole heart.”

God is emphatic that the captivity is a judgment upon the ungodly, but also for the good of the faithful remnant. Now they do not feel it as good, to see your city, your country destroyed, and to be taken into captivity into another nation, no one feels is good. But God says “It is for your good, and the good of your descendants, because I am the Lord, and I know what righteousness and justice are.”

In fact we can go on to say that all soundly administered and theologically motivated chastisement is eschatological in nature. In other words when you discipline and punish your child, you are applying eschatology. You are saying to a child “don’t do that, and if you do certain things are going to happen.” And if the child does it, you apply that chastisement. That’s eschatology, it’s healthy, it’s necessary when it is properly done. God’s judgments in history are thus continuous, and judgments, captivity and restoration, cannot be limited to the Old Testament era, they are a continuing fact. It is interesting as we’ve gotten away from this fact, we’ve also belittled the obvious facts of the old Testament, almost any book you get about the Babylonian captivity, that is written in our day, will pooh-pooh that event. It will tell you that only a handful were carried away captive, maybe 40-50 thousand, and that the idea of the Babylonian captivity being a great and disastrous event is nonsense.

Well, that’s ironic. If an enemies comes in and takes over the whole land, and reduces the capital to ruble, and for a little better than 70 years it is nothing but rubble, it’s hard to belittle such an event. It’s amazing how scholars can be carried away with what they’re doing, and come to such remarkable conclusions. After all we have to remember that in the lifetime of some of us, when the German inflation of 1923 hit, and people were being paid with a bushel basket of money because the inflation was so bad, and then were being paid twice a day, because the paper was depreciating so rapidly, university professors got up and insisted, and wrote, that there was no inflation, actually deflation was at work. Well, that tells you what self-deception learned men are capable of; and so it is when men belittle the fact of the Babylonian captivity. It is because they don’t like the idea of captivity, they do not want to see God’s handiwork in these events, and the fact that these events were great judgments, dramatic ones.

As we look at the fact of captivity we must recognize there are certain stages in it, the first stage of captivity is moral and religious. It is a captivity to sin, in John 8 verses 31-36 our Lord deals with this fact and he tells the leaders of the people they are slaves, and they are very indignant about that. But he tell them they are slaves because they are captives to sin, and that only He can set them free. All captivity begins with covenant breaking, before the physical fact of slavery there is sin. True the innocent remnant suffers also, because we are members one of another, not only in the church but in the world, and what happens around us affects us. If there is a fire next door, it’s something for you to be concerned about. The world of the fallen Adam is all around us, it affects us and our hopes; and unless we govern that world and change it, it will govern and affect us. Thus the first stage of captivity is moral and religious.

Then second, moral and religious captivity leads to political and economic captivity. A captivity in which men pursue false ideas and will not surrender them, because they are religiously committed to folly, to evil, to stupidity; and it is incredible how relentlessly they pursue them. This kind of thing can be the politics of constipation [laughter] nothing moves, it’s an endless problem which is never resolved, and this is our problem today. We keep repeating the old worn out nostrums, and there is no solution that anyone sees except spending more money doing the same thing. If you want to see this kind of captivity look at Washington D.C. today, we have the politics of captivity. We have seen lately our president, Reagan, going to Europe and we are told that he went there with data that the Soviet Union is seriously considering occupying all of Europe in 1983. They paid no attention to them, and he paid no attention to himself because what did he do on his return? He opened up grain cells, one of the most necessary instruments of warfare, food. Without that the Soviet Union cannot wage war, if we do not have an occupation of Europe next year it will only be the grace of God and the continuing agricultural disaster in that country. Now this is the politics of captivity, every country is manifesting it, they cannot change. They keep repeating the same old errors and evils. And then you come to the third stage, the slave state.

Captivity can be to an outside power, or it can be to your own civil government. We’re very close to that now, we’ve reached the point where congress is now afraid to challenge the IRS. In fact the IRS is giving all kinds of special concessions to congress, and congress is enjoying its captivity because they are virtually exempt, now, from any income tax; so they’re ready to go along with it. Congress made one resistants to it at the pressure of the Christian community a few years ago when the IRS got slapped, hard, with the Dornan and Ashbrook amendments; and Ashbrook is now dead and Dornan is not in congress, and the IRS is paying off congress. You can be a captive to your own government; your own civil government can be a slave state to you.

Or you can be a captive to an outsider power, we are moving towards captivity. We can only turn this around by returning to the Lord. The Soviet Union is a land in captivity, as well as a state making slaves of others. But the worst slavery is within the soviet union, conditions there are far worse than anywhere outside. But with repentance and regeneration restoration follows, and when a covenant people are faithful to God’s covenant grace and covenant law he makes them comparable to the tabernacle in the wilderness, and this is what our text is talking about. God says when a people turn and repent they are cleansed, they are purged, they are made a new people. They are redeemed by the spirit of judgment and by the spirit of burning, and God then goes on to compare them to the tabernacle in the wilderness, and to the day of creation. Two images used, in fact the very word that is used in Genesis one “Bara – create”, “God created the heavens and the earth” is used here again. “And the Lord will create upon every dwelling place of Mount Zion, and upon her assemblies, a cloud and smoke by day and the shining of a flaming fire by night. For upon all the glory shall be a defense, and their shall be a tabernacle for shadow in the daytime from the heat, and for a place of refuge and for a cover from storm and from rain.”

And God tells us that captivity is His doing, He also tells us that restoration and protection is His doing, that He remakes us, He makes us a new creation as surely as He created heaven and earth in the beginning. And even as in the wilderness journey Israel and the tabernacle were surrounded by the pillar and the cloud, so too we who become God’s people are surrounded and protected, so that we have, when we walk in the Lord, supernatural protection. We may not see the pillar and the cloud, but we are given the assurance that it is with us, that when we walk in covenant faithfulness we are His.

Dr. E.J. Young, one of the greatest of the Old Testament professors and scholars of this century, said concerning this text “when they Lord will wash away then He will create. First, however, the filth must be washed away. The coming glory is comparable only with creation.” Remarkable fact, when we are restored, when we are redeemed, if we walk in faithfulness to God and to His covenant grace and law we are told that the glory that shall be manifest will be like the glory of creation; when God created the heavens and the earth, and looking upon His handiwork said that it was very good; and when, as He tells Job, the morning stars sang together, and the sons of God shouted for joy; so will be our glory in the Lord when we walk in faithfulness. This is what eschatology is about, it tells us how God works in time and history as well as at the end. Because He is present in all of it, He cannot be limited to merely the supernatural realm, but to the total world of creation, to all things.

Because God created the world in time, He regards both as very important. But the church has not done so all too often, an antinomianism has added to this evil. For to undermine God’s law is to undermine the seriousness of sin.

A good many years ago, back in the 30’s Ilago {?} commented on the difference in men today and in some generations ago, on how we no longer take sin seriously, and therefore we do not take God’s grace, or God’s government, or God’s judgments seriously. He wrote, and I quote: “The present generation is not morally serious enough to believe in hell. It can scarcely understands Calvin’s words ‘without judgment there can be no God.’ It has sympathy with the jive of Heine ‘The Good God will forgive me, for that’s His job.’” I believe those words of Heine were his dying words when he was asked if he did not want to seek God’s grace and forgiveness.

To undermine God’s eschatological processes in history is to lose all sense of reality, and all sense of meaning in history, and also to become irrelevant. God is at work, here and now, accomplishing His purposes and His goals; and we must see our lives as in the hands of God, and ourselves as His and surrounded by the pillar and the cloud of His presence. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God grant that as we walk day by day, we walk with the knowledge of Thy presence, that Thou art closer to us than we are to ourselves, that Thy purposes rules and overrules in all our lives, and that if God be for us, who can be against us. Give us grace to take hands off our lives, and to commit them into Thy care. Grant us this we beseech Thee in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Yes?

[Audience member] One commented it might be of the seven stages freedom to bondage, I’ve forgotten them but {?}

[Rushdoony] We are moving from freedom to bondage, but we can rejoice in the fact that there is a tremendous movement now from bondage to freedom throughout the length and breadth of this land, and the Christian school movement represents one such step, a major one, and the fact that men like pastor Everett Sileven are ready to go to jail for their faith indicates that the resistance is growing.

Any other questions or comment?

[Audience member] It’s a charitable indictment of the church and a measure of how far Greek though has infiltrated Christianity when {?} as you said, Christians hold God so far above creation that He doesn’t care for the mundane things of life. Suicides, and poor self image, and the whole thing all go together. They cannot hold any sort of covenant belief because the covenant requires that God takes care of the leaves on the trees.

[Rushdoony] yes, we have been so heavily influenced by Greek thought that our thinking is often more Greek than Biblical.

Any other questions or comments?

Yes?

[Audience member] When you called, like when you spank your child, an eschatology, is that because there’s a commandment given and then an end result?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Same audience member] So every little event like that is eschatology?

[Rushdoony] Every little event like that is eschatological if it is done faithfully in terms of God’s word. So the spanking of a child is eschatology in action; grading papers in a classroom, flunking students, passing students, all that is eschatology in action.

[Same audience member] So we have a responsibility to make the end result a Godly one, either the blessing or the punishment…

[Rushdoony] Precisely, we have a responsibility.

Yes?

[Audience member] Somebody must have written of all the different captivities and releases throughout the Bible, do you know of such a book?

[Rushdoony] There is nothing in recent years or in print that I know of. There simply isn’t the same interest now in that sort of thing.

Any other questions or comments? If not, let us bow our heads in prayer.

Our Father it has been good for us to be here, we delight in Thy word and in Thy commandments. Thy word is truth, and Thy word is a light unto our feet, and a guide on our journey, our pilgrimage. Bless us in our fellowship, bless us in Thy service and give us joy in the victory that is assured in Jesus Christ, in His name we pray, amen.